Our Ultimate Commencement Speech

Graduation: there are so many things about that big event that you should be excited for, like celebrating with all of your friends, or basking in the relief of being done with the gargantuan task you’ve undertaken for the past however-many years. But there’s one part of graduation day that, admittedly, can get a bit overrated: the commencement speech.

FYI: we’re huge fans of storytelling, and we’d never write off anyone’s heartfelt advice!! But let’s be honest: often, the pressure of the commencement speech gets to a person, and they end up filling most of their time with a less-than-moving patchwork of cliches stolen from the ghosts of great graduationspeakerspast.

So we thought, if there’s already a good chance that you’re going to get a mishmash of inspiration, why not have it actually be inspiring?! Maybe even relevant??

We’ve interviewed hundreds of people—including many acclaimed commencement speakers—who’ve given us years’ worth of candid advice about how to navigate universal human struggles and intimidating inflection points like graduation day. We’ve taken some of our favorite quotes from these interviews and assembled them into what we consider to be a pretty damn good graduation speech!

(This way, if your actual graduation speaker turns out to be less than inspiring, you can just use that speech time to think about more important things, like if you’ll get the summer internship you applied for, or if your hair looks weird under your grad cap. (Spoiler alert: it does—it’s almost as if those hats were specifically engineered not to fit on a human head…))

Without further ado, here’s our ultimate graduation speech! You can click on any line that sticks out to you to watch the original Roadtrip Nation interview that quote was pulled from.